SEO and Internet Marketing Blog by Pradeep

Google Instant’s impact on Impressions & CTR:

Your website’s Impressions can increase and Click-Through-Rate can decrease with the new Google Instant search. A Google user/searcher can sometimes get distract from the suggestions listed in Google Instant and hence Impressions and CTR of a website fluctuates. I will try to explain you below in an easy manner how this new system affects these two things and how to adapt from these changes.

Let us first understand how impressions of a site increases. For example if you want to search for ‘Halloween Costumes for children’, Google starts displaying/previewing websites in its search results page right from the beginning of your search phrase letter ‘H’ to the end of your search phrase letter ‘n’.  Here, websites that will get displayed to each letter of your search term: ‘Halloween Costumes for children’ gains impressions.

Confused? Check out the below images:

In the first image, you can see Google Instant displaying results for [Halloween] after typing only the partial search [hallow]. This means the Instant system actually predicts and suggests search results automatically for every letter you type inside the search field even before you completely finish typing the word [Halloween](as shown in the second image). In the above two examples, the first two results [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween & www.halloween.com/] gains impressions because Instant is quickly bringing the results even before you completely type your search term: ‘Halloween Costumes for children’ .

This is the basic criteria for a website to increase its Impressions with the new Google Instant Search

Now, take a look at the below pictures that depicts how Click-Through-Rate(CTR) Decreases.

In the right image,www.justkidcostumes.com ranks no.1 for the keyword ‘halloween costumes for children’. It means this website can only reached by searchers if they completely type the query. But if searchers divert to other websites Google Instant suggests in the drop down list as shown in above pictures, it will decrease this website’s click through rate (CTR).

These are the chances a website can increase or decrease Impressions and CTR.

Simple and Effective ways to Adapt to these Fluctuations:

Impressions:

Google’s Webmaster tool can help your website by tracking the number of impressions and CTR it gets via Google search. So when you list out the keywords that shows your site’s impressions areas/position, you will understand how near or far your website is appearing in Google’s search results.  And when you find your website positioned at certain point to a keyword your website has ever displayed before and that the keyword is also near to your business, you can start optimizing to rank for that keyword.

For CTR:

If you notice your website’s CTR decreased due to above reason, start optimizing your website to rank for the keywords/phrases that majorly affects user’s distraction which can be collected from the suggestions/predictions box. In the above example ‘Halloween costumes for kids’ is the top distracting key phrase for which the CTR decreasing website has to be optimized for.

Also, it is now the time to optimize your keywords for multiple short phrases. It doesn’t mean that long tail keywords have no importance. But that, is another story.

What strategies are you trying to your SEO/link-building Campaigns with this new search enhancement?

Please share your thoughts below.

Happy weekend!!

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How to Rank for Target Business Keywords

While in the first and second steps of this keyword ranking guide you get the information about finding the right target keywords and how to use them in your website, this final step contains information on backlinks, methods to gain relevance and popularity to rank for your target keywords.

Importance of Backlinks

Backlinks -  are the links pointing to your web page or website from other pages. The number of links pointing a page is often used by search engines to rank in its results page. So backlinks play very important role in organic search results (search engine results). This is the basic reason why webmasters concentrate to build backlinks to their websites. But this process is complicated and more time consuming. If you can afford on that you can move forward building backlinks to your website or hire an SEO expert and save your time.

What Major Search Engines Suggests

Building backlinks or link-building process is important because major search engines like Bing and Google suggests them as an important ranking and marketing factors. Check out below what they suggest:

Google :  If your site is rather new and still unknown, a good way marketing technique is to get involved in the community around your topic. Interact and contribute on forums and blogs. Just keep in mind to contribute in a positive way, rather than spamming or soliciting for your site. Just building a reputation can drive people to your site. And they will keep on visiting it and linking to it.

Bing : Successful link-building efforts require a long-term commitment, not an overnight or turnkey solution. You need to continually invest in link building efforts with creativity and time. Good things come to those who wait and work smartly!

Summary: Links form relevant blogs, forums and other sources that are available online are useful to your website marketing methods and link-building efforts and results are not instant.

How to Gain Relevance and Popularity

It is really simple if you understand the core factors of ranking algorithms. Every website/page should meet these two factors to rank in search engines results pages: Relevance and Popularity.

Relevance is based on the content of your pages as well as the links pointing your pages/site. Popularity is based on total number of links pointing your page/site.

A webpage/site with keywords optimized content will be given more relevance in search engine’s assessment. And a website/page with more keyword based anchor text links pointing/referring it, will gain popularity.

So when your website is optimized with keywords inside the content as described in the second step of this guide: How and Where to use right keywords on your site, you can gain relevance, and popularity is achieved when your site/page reaches maximum links pointing it. This can be done by effective link-building (back-links) methods.

Conclusion of the Topic

Keyword ranking is the ultimate goal in search engine optimization. You can achieve it when you apply things that are explained in all these 3 steps of keyword ranking guide. On a whole your webpage or website can rank for a keyword if you have the most relevant content and links pointing your site. Links with target keywords in the anchor text can benefit more in ranking.  So while link-building try to have your keywords inside your anchor text.

All the Best!

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Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing a website both internally and externally to increase the traffic, visibility and rank of a website in search engines. SEO is the most important factor in your success online. This is because approximately 80% of Internet users get information from the major search engines Google, Yahoo, MSN. If your website is not available in these Search Engines indices, you will have to miss maximum number of visitors/targeted visitors to your website. Search Engine Optimization is the best choice that helps you make your website visible in the search engines.

For a website to rank well in search engines, it has to be optimized as per the Search Engine standards regularly. Note that I say ‘regularly’ because of immense websites on WWW, Search Engines updates their ranking factors regularly. Though search engines follows hundreds of algorithms to display the results, there are specific factors combined for the output of those results. Relevancy and Popularity are the two major algorithms measured as part of ranking a website.

Relevancy:  If a webpage has matching information the user looking for, Search Engines display them in their results page. This can be done when the content of the page is optimized as per standards. The more relevance a page is, higher the chances to appear in SERP.

Popularity:  It is measured based on reference given from one document to another. As much references as a document receives it gains that much popularity.

It’s all in the optimization process. But you need to realize that this is not a one time service. Hence, website optimization is crucial if we like to have our website sustain long-lasting results.

In the next post I will share the information on some fundamental principles to follow optimizing a Webpage.

Note: No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.

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